Paul Lilly
Paul is a seasoned geek who was first seduced into the world of computers and technology by the Commodore 64, and through the years he’s courted a number of OSes and platforms from DOS on up to the latest version of Windows. Having joined the HotHardware team in 2011, Paul is now a mainstay of the site covering the news beat and reviews, and resident wiseguy who keeps the mood light. He’s also an experienced freelance technology writer whose work has appeared in a number of online and print publications.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Users over on Crucial's support forum have been complaining about a strange error that manifests on certain M4 solid state drives (SSDs) after precisely 5,200 hours of use. It appears to only affect the 64GB models, with affected drives...
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Is your DSLR camera suddenly strutting around with a goofy grin on its LCD face? If so, it must have heard about Sony's new high-speed XQD memory cards that support the recently adopted XQD specification for high-speed, high performance...
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Lost in the shuffle of Ultrabooks, tablet PCs, and everything else that dominated the headlines in 2011 is the all-in-one (AIO) PC market. We've seen several new AIO models emerge over the past 12 months or so, and who knows, maybe in another year or two these things will replace traditional...
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It's out with the old and in with the new over at Intel. According to reports, the Santa Clara chip maker is letting its hardware partners know of a revised schedule to halt production and/or stop the supply of more than 25 existing desktop processor models so that it can focus on and make...
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Listen closely, do you hear anything? Any fanfare, ballyhooing, or trumpets? Neither do we, and that's because AMD opted for none of those things when releasing its Radeon HD 7670 graphics card in complete silence. There is, however, a product page on AMD's website that lists this as an...
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LG's giving its Optimus smartphone a second act. Simply enough, it's called the Optimus 2, the details of which are now available on LG's website, along with a photo gallery. What you'll find if you surf on over is a mostly entry-level smartphone device, at least by today's standards, with...
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We're only four days into the New Year and already Advanced Micro Devices would probably like to take a mulligan. According to reports, Quanta Computer Inc. is angry at AMD and it's ATI division for allegedly selling defective mobile chips...
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The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) is just now getting around to publishing data for chip sales in the month of November 2011, and on the surface they're not particularly flattering. According to SIA, worldwide chip sales two...
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For the love of all that is holy on the Internet, it's time to stick in a fork in Internet Explorer 6 and consider it done, says Microsoft (and we wholeheartedly agree, by the way), in a matter of words. That's not a direct quote from the Redmond software giant, but heck, the company did go...
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This isn't just a new year for Cooler Master, 2012 just happens to represent the company's 20th year of service. What better way to celebrate the occasion than to release a new chassis? Honestly, we can think of several, but none of them...
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Would you miss Best Buy if the electronics chain suddenly shut its doors for good the way Circuit City did awhile back? The knee-jerk reaction by many tech enthusiasts is to answer "Hell no!" followed by a Best Buy horror story or three, but such incidents aside, would you really be happier if...
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We're going to let you in on a little secret, and while you're free to pass it on, understand that nobody will ever believe you. In fact, if you do share this secret, you might suffer a barrage of insults, and depending on your stature, could even end up with a wedgie. You've been warned...
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Digital pirates in search of free reading material are turning to illicit download sites where they can obtain copyrighted eBooks free of charge. The obvious allure for eBook pirates is just like anything else -- free treasure -- but in...
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While Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox duke it out on the desktop, the browser wars are a little more lopsided in the mobile space, with Apple's iOS platform leading the charge. Apple closed the year out with a majority market share...
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It was always assumed that Mozilla's Firefox browser would one day overtake Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the global browser market, ending IE's reign that began when the Redmond software giant buried Netscape Navigator years ago. But as it turns out, Google Chrome might have a better shot...
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Sony's New Year's resolution must have been to sell a more affordable tablet, as evidenced by the Tablet S receiving a much needed price cut. The 9.4-inch tablet now sells for $400 on Sony's website for the 16GB model, and $500 for the 32GB version, down from $500 and $600 respectively (though...
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Acer's Aspire One D270 netbook will be one of the first to hit the ground running around Intel's Cedar Trail platform, and if the number of impatient vendors who have started listing the netbook ahead of its official release are any indication, we can surmise the D270 will land very soon...
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Back in the days of old, overclocking used to require setting DIP switches and chanting prayers to the gods of clockspeed and stability. There was a good chance you could burn something up, and if you did, the motherboard vendor would...
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When an advance copy of Crysis 2 leaked to the Internet a full month before the game's scheduled release, Crytek and Electronic Arts (EA) were understandably miffed and, as it turns out, justified in their fears of mass piracy. As 2011 comes to a close, Crysis 2 holds rank as the most pirated...
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Typically where there's smoke you'll find fire, but as it relates to the rash of iPad 3 rumors the past few days, things are getting a little bit silly. Many of the rumors trace back to DigiTimes, which is reporting all kinds of news based on what it's hearing from sources behind the trenches in Apple's supply chain, one of them being that...
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There are different levels of overclocking. On the bottom end, a person might choose to crank things up a few MHz for a modest performance boost without really taxing their cooling setup or complimentary components. A few levels up you...
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Microsoft came ever-so-close to ending the year without a single unscheduled patch outside of its monthly Patch Tuesday routine, but in the end, three "Critical" vulnerabilities found in its .NET Framework prompted the Redmond software...
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